Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Local Hype

Tonight I will give my first local artist presentation since the GRAMMATRON world tour back in 1997-98. The event is being co-sponsored by Boulder Digital Arts and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. It's strange to have an exhibition in the local museum after all of this international hullabaloo over the last decade. But the curators at BMOCA have been some of the best people I have worked with and it's really great to share artwork made with my local collaborators in the DJRABBI collective.The exhibition sponsor, who go by the name The Collection, have their finger on the pulse of what it takes to make a contemporary arts scene pop with excitement in a hyped up, progressive community like Boulder. After having lived here for almost twenty years, I can finally say that the art scene is beginning to take on a life of its own, the way I have seen it happen in other places all around the world.

The local newspaper, which has some influence in this rich community of go-getters, wrote a very smart article on the exhibition:

The digital art project by Boulder County artists Mark Amerika (text), Rick Silva (visuals) and Trace Reddell (sound) is a forward-looking piece based on the 1973 film"La Socit du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle)," by French philosopher, artist and social critic Guy Debord.

Inspired by the film's appropriation of found imagery relevant to the time, the three Boulder artists conceived of a "digital remix" of the film that would lay new images, sound and subtitles on top of Debord's original. The three are known collectively as DJRABBI, a nod to both the remix aspect of their work and a Jewish tradition in which the Talmud is constantly being rewritten by rabbis to reflect modern concerns.